Overcoming Gangs & Beyond has a Leadership Academy that is a multi-component program. The program is designed to be offered in approximately 50 sessions of 1 hour each. The purpose of our Leadership Academy is to facilitate the development of healthy young people who are Alive and Free Thriving and Hopeful. We fulfill our purpose by offering curricula focused on 3 primary areas:

Their belief and value system
Their personal and community esteem
Violence prevention
Our initial focus is on the reprogramming the participants. The curriculum for this area has the goal of changing the beliefs, values and attitudes that lead to violent and deviant behavior. We take a close examination of the commandments of the streets. This is also the area where we diagnose the participants to determine how at risk they are to violence.

The curriculum following our focus on the values, beliefs, and attitudes focuses on the development of individual and community esteem and character building. This is accomplished by providing curriculum that embraces the great history and traditions of Africans before their arrival in North America. Hispanic culture is also a significant portion of this curriculum. We believe that knowledge of self is one of the keys to love of self and self determination.

Our Violence Prevention Curriculum for High Risk Individuals is the corner stone of our program and is offered in an attempt to address the issues of violence and homicide among young people by helping participants to become more aware of:

Homicide and the factors associated with it
Positive ways to deal with anger, fear, pain and arguments, the leading precipitants of homicide
The choices, other than fighting, shooting, or stabbing, available to young people in conflict situations
The curriculum does not teach participants to be passive or ignore their anger, fear and pain. It does not attach a moral value to anger, fear and pain, or imply that being violent makes a person “evil.” The phenomenon of violent behavior is presented more pragmatically. This curriculum recognizes anger, fear and pain as normal and potentially constructive emotions. Participants have legitimate reasons for their anger, fear, and pain. They need to learn to respond in healthy rather than react in unhealthy ways. Violence is, by and large, an unhealthy way to react.

This curriculum embraces a public health strategy which is based on the assumption that education can alter behavior. This approach has been used in a variety of successful campaigns which we are all familiar. The education campaign to teach the dangers of smoking, for example, has led to behavorial changes. Applying this approach to violence is relatively new, but there are indications that violent behavior is amenable to this approach. The Omega Street Soldiers Alive and Free Movement is just one of them program that demonstrates this. The city of San Francisco, CA has already this approach for its entire public school system.

What is the focus of the curriculum?

This curriculum tries to show high school students the extent to which they are at risk of homicide and a serious violent act, what factors usually attend a homicide or serious violent act and positive ways to deal with anger, fear, pain and arguments, the major causes of homicide and serious violent acts. It is important to emphasize the Violence Prevention Curriculum for High Risk Individuals (VPCHRI) in not a course in pacifism. Although nonviolence is discussed frequently, at no point in the curriculum are students told they should never, under any circumstances, fight. Instead, the curriculum treats fighting as one choice among many, and it encourages students to examine carefully the risks and rewards of all possible choices. The goals then are:

Increase participants’ awareness of the causes and effects of violence
Increase participants’ awareness of their own risk of becoming victims of homicide and serious violent acts
Enable participants to identify the factors that lead to violence
Help participants realize that violent behavior is a choice, with negative short = and long-term consequences
Illustrate to participants that violence is preventable
Assist participants in learning that anger, fear, and pain are a normal part of life, and that they can be expressed and channeled in healthy, constructive ways
Help participants understand that controlling anger and dealing with fear and pain is part of maturing
Enable participants to identify positive ways to express anger and deal with their fear and pain they feel
Encourage participants to think about alternatives to violence in conflict situations